Islamists recruiting in Spain, supporters rising in Cataluña

According to the reports gathered by El Confidencial Digital, the Mossos d’Esquadra are investigating the Sunni Islamist organization named Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (HuT) -or Party for the Islamic Liberation-. The number of Islamist groups of this kind is rising on the Internet, and using the WWW to gain supporters, that could be even recruited by the radical Islamism.

HuT was born in Jerusalem in 1953 founded by the Palestinian Taqiuddin al-Nabhani. They are supporters of an Islamic macroState or Caliphate formed by all the countries whose citizens are, mostly, Muslims. Its supporters reject Western democracy and pretend as a final goal, that the whole world is converted to Islam. The organization has never condemned explicitly any of the terrorist attacks of a Jihadist origin.

In Spain, this Islamist group began its activity during the period 2004-2005 and, in Feb. 2006, when the Mohammen cartoon crisis was happenning, HuT raises its activity and presence both physical and in Internet.

Accrding to the Islamism expert Javier Jordán y Sol Tarrés, who had described for jihadmonitor.org these movements, the main characteristics of this gruop are:

1. they normally live in the Autonomous Communities situated in the north of Spain.
2. they are people with a middle, middle-high, grade of education, with professional qualification and with a high knowledge of Islam, and very strict following of its rules.
3. Till March 2007, the main way of contacting these supporters is the private e-mail through an Islamist forum in Internet (www[dot]islamenlinea[dot]com/foro]. This web page is based on Kuwait. There were more between 30 and 40 sympathisers of HuT in that forum. Más de la mitad, mujeres. The Civil Guard conducted an opertation against other 2 youths, which maintained web sites with a radical Islamist content. Inmediately, the mentioned forum was closed.

According to the same experts, there are also common characteristics of the way this supporters act in Internet:

1. Active participation in forums, e-mailing lists and Internet groups (including the Spanish-speaking Shiites), both in religious and social or political subjects. The forums and groups are selected considering the number of people registered and how active they are; they are also considering specially the groups of women converted to Islam the majority of which have a Salafist orientation.
2. They also sent periodically and simultaneously news related to Islamic world to forums and groups where they take part. The members of HuT insist especially on the news related to Irak y Afganistán, to the Western troops behaviour against the civil population, very hard photos of the terrorist attacks (maimed people, dead children, etc.). They are just stimulating the reject against the “Western imperialism” (specially against Israel and USA).
3. They also introduce once and again in forums and groups the Caliphate subject and the Islamic obligation to fight for that objective.
4. They normally use the moments of tension betwen Muslim and non-Muslim communities to raise a concience and to indoctrinate people in the Caliphate theory. When the situation relaxes a bit, they normally publish news related to the situation of Muslims in non-Muslim societies. They reproduce them both in English or in Spanish, and they normally copy them from webpages associated with HuT, or with the ones considered truthful, the majority of which are Salafist.

Source:El Confidencial digital.com